The Bitch Posse (9 page)

March 2003
Chippewa County War Memorial Hospital
Sault Sainte Marie, Michigan

Scotty’s still not back from wherever the hell he’s been all night. The logical thoughts of why this might be the case float around Amy’s mind, but she can’t process anything right now.

What’s going on behind the curtain? She hears the strain in the doctors’ voices as they’re cutting her baby out of her. Her abdomen must be a mountain of steaming blood. Of course, they won’t let her see anything. The whole show’s going on behind the curtain, so all she can do is imagine.

Next to her left ear, the anesthesiologist says, “I can give you something to make you sleep. If you don’t want to be awake for this, it’s perfectly understandable.” She wants to smack him. Of course she wants to be awake for her daughter’s birth. Only this isn’t how she imagined it, she pictured a vaginal birth, at term, Scotty cutting the
cord, the doctor (just one, her OB) placing the baby on her belly, letting them nuzzle, snuggle, bond right away, maybe even nurse.

Instead a hospital band’s tight on Amy’s wrist, the plastic cutting into her flesh, and for some bizarre reason that’s all she can notice even though the rest of her is numbed from the neck down, from the spinal for the emergency C-section. She’s watching it all like she’s in a dream, the doctors’ anxious voices rising around her. The ceiling is pure white, a sky of fog, and somehow, although she should be worried about the baby, all she can think about is the damned wristband and how she’ll get it off. Or maybe that’s all she’ll let herself think about, because if she doesn’t fill her head with thoughts,
CallieCallieCallieCallie,
the name of her dead sister, thumps through her brain.

Amy’s next-door neighbor Catey drove her here last night. They talked little in the car, Catey straining to see through the small patch of windshield she’d scraped clean.

It must be morning by now.

Bits and pieces come back. Amy hemorrhaging all over the car and crying. Catey stroking her hair as she drove. The blood warming the car even more than the heater. A Rorschach of blood against snow as Catey helped her to the emergency room. In an instant they hooked her up to monitors, and that was probably when they put this goddamn wristband on her, and when they told her that the worst-case scenario was that the baby could be born not breathing and be put on a ventilator, have a hemorrhage in her skull causing brain damage or death, be blind, mentally retarded, handicapped for life.
CallieCallieCallieCallie.
Amy swallowed the words like pills, downed them by herself since Scotty wasn’t there to sweeten them and hand them to her one by one.

She won’t think of Callie, won’t think of the lack of air, even though she herself is suffocating now. The hospital is stuffy and smells like someone’s dumped a container of cleaning fluid over the floor, and when she breathes in, the odor stings her nostrils, burns them, lights them on fire.

Catey stayed by her side for a long time, bless her, watched them try the terbutaline pump until the baby’s blood pressure started to drop, until they decided there was no other choice but to do an emergency C-section. Catey couldn’t stay for that, of course, so she left her number with the hospital and went home to her own babies, at Amy’s insistence. As she left she pulled a cross off her neck and latched it around Amy’s. Amy doesn’t go to church, quit believing in God a long time ago. But she believes in Catey, and the cross rests now on her collarbone, where once rested a blue Czech glass necklace, made by Amy herself. But those days are over, of course.

She glances down for a minute, but the big green curtain means she can’t see, and her eyes have gone all blurry anyway. Tears roll down her cheeks, but she can’t feel the place the anguish comes from, and she realizes suddenly that her big sobs always start in her uterus. She feels foolish for not figuring this out before, and imagines life beyond the curtain. They’ve sliced open her belly, yanked her half-full womb from her body, and sliced it the other way, trying to pull out her baby, her little girl, her second chance.

The baby is lifted into the air, not much bigger than the doctor’s hand, the tiniest baby Amy’s ever seen, bright and red and not crying, gasping like a fish for air.
My daughter . . . My daughter . . . I have a daughter. . . .
She’s all skin stretched over bones, and right away they’re hooking her up to a million monitors and wires, taping her here and there, attaching her to nasal tubes. In an instant she’s in an incubator or an isolette or whatever that plastic box is called, and they wheel her toward the NICU and she’s gone.

Her baby is gone.

Tears stream into Amy’s hair, and
Where the hell are you, Scotty?
And she can’t heave those deep sobs that make her feel good, because her womb is her pit of tears, her source of everything. Someone says, “You have a beautiful little girl. Don’t worry, we’ll take care of her. You can see her later.” Frustration oozes through her. She wants to get up from
the operating table, run down to the NICU to see her baby, her little girl without a name, her little girl who was born the day after Scotty’s birthday, her little girl who needs her, who’s crying without her mommy. Amy’s whole being aches with yearning for her child, the child who’s been torn from her, the one who only moments before was a part of her. They need to be together, why don’t the doctors understand that? She’s going to jump up and bolt, but the problem is the only thing Amy can feel is that fucking hospital bracelet, the handcuff, so she’s trapped.

They’re mumbling something about stitching her up so the scar won’t show. What the hell does Amy care about a goddamn scar? “How much longer will this take? When can I see her?”

The doctor answers the first question but not the second. “Ha ha ha, the cutting’s so quick but the stitching takes forever.”

That does not amuse her in the least, and now,
now
is when Scotty bursts into the room and stands over her. “Amy, Amy, how did it happen?” It’s like he’s accusing her of something, of having lost the baby.

No, God, don’t think that, you didn’t lose the baby, not yet.

How dare you think “yet”?

She meets his eyes, and what’s in them, she’s suspected for so long. In his widened pupils, the ones that suck her into the pit, the answer echoes back why he didn’t come home for dinner, or for his fucking cake that’s gathering dust now on the kitchen counter. He was with someone, and she’s pretty sure she knows who. Suzy Petersen, that little brunette who’s the receptionist at the Toyota dealership. Amy refuses even to ask him where he was or why he’s so late. She won’t admit she wished he’d been here. Let him feel goddamn guilty, let him feel like hell. All she can spit out is “Catey drove me to the hospital. I bled all over her car. You should call and offer to have it detailed.”

Scotty just looks at her, his brown eyes filling up with something.
Don’t you goddamn dare apologize, I don’t want to talk to you.
He whispers, “How is she? How’s our baby?”

Someone must have told him it was a girl. She doesn’t answer and lets the tears keep streaming into her hair. Scotty reaches out, strokes it. It feels comforting somehow, even though half of her hates his guts. She can’t get up and bolt anyway, so she lets him rub her tangled hair. She drifts into sleep that’s bumpy and wild-ridish, filled with pictures of
CallieHemmlerScottysnowbloodbloodblood,
and she can’t have slept for more than a minute because when her eyes pop open, the curtain’s still up. They’re still making sure her scar doesn’t show, and she feels very alone, here in this cold room with doctors and nurses and Scotty, and the world is cracking in two. The clock on the wall says it’s early morning, and she hasn’t slept at all. She closes her eyes again and groans at the neck ache that’s suddenly seized up from her shoulder to her eyeballs. The spinal must be wearing off. She curves her thoughts around the neck ache and spins toward sleep again.

Scotty’s hands move away from her hair, and she wishes she was dead, wishes she never had to wake up. In her dream babies are crying, fat cherubs with rosy cheeks and rattles and chubby tummies. A knife has sliced into her belly, but they’ll sew it up so there’s no scar at all.

Not even the tiniest little mark.

March 1988
Holland High School

I’m sitting in the second semicircle of desks in drama class, legs crossed, staring at Mr. Schafer, Rob, whoever the hell he is. Behind me are the makeup mirrors and the double doors that lead to the stage. I can’t concentrate on what he’s saying because I keep thinking of what happened there, in the great dark presence behind where I sit, a drowning bubble into another world, a pit.

It always hurts the first time,
I remind myself.

You have to hurt if you want to feel anything at all.

I didn’t say a word to Amy and Cherry. This is the first time I’ve kept something like this from them. Maybe I’m afraid they’ll talk me out of it, because if I let myself think too much about it, the whole situation is vaguely terrifying. But I don’t need their warnings. I know what I’m doing and it’s fun and daring and all about the new me, and I’m going to keep doing it.

I’m staring at his face and he’s conspicuously
not
looking at me. Instead he’s directing his comments to Pammie McFadden, who couldn’t care less about the nurse’s relationship with Juliet, who only took drama because it’s supposed to be an easy senior A. She’s staring at him too, openmouthed, lips wet, leaning waaay over to give him a peek down her top if he wants it.

And he takes it, what guy wouldn’t? She crosses her arms on the desktop and leans forward even farther, and he gives her breasts the once-over. Fuck. Shit. My heart drums in my ears. Why does Pammie get to sit in the front row? It should be me.

God, yes, I’m sleeping with the sexy teacher, me me me. Boring Rennie Taylor is having an affair with a married man, and my breath catches in my throat. Before I know what’s happening, my upper leg’s rocking on my lower one, and I press my fingers to my temples. I have to get through sixth-period French and the whole
Grease
rehearsal before I’ll see him alone, and find out if he even wants to be with me again. I can stay out late again tonight, too, I’ll tell him. Cherry’s cutting school today, and she’s meeting Amy later. I bet she’ll ask us to sleep over, which is great because then I don’t have to deal with Dad and Kelly and precious little Mallory howling for her pacifier. Instead I can drown whatever ends up happening with me and Mr. Schafer by firing up a great big old joint, blabbing with my friends, notebook scrawling. Of course, I have the Bitch Goddess Notebook and haven’t written a damn thing. I can’t write about what I’m really thinking. I’ll just have to tell them I’m too busy.

“Before the bell rings, I’m handing back your tests from last week.” My heart thumps in my chest. Play practice has been eating into my study time, and I hadn’t even read Act Three when I took the test. I’m a pretty good bullshitter, but I know I bombed that one.

His long fingers shuffle through the papers, slide them from the top, push them in front of other kids. Where’s mine? More papers are handed out. Where?

He stops in front of my desk, and I’m eye level with the fly of his jeans. Despite myself I imagine reaching out, unsnapping the top, dragging down the zipper, the skritch like cicadas, and oh, God, I’m staring, Rennie Taylor is staring at her teacher’s fly. I glance around hoping no one’s noticed, but of course Pammie’s shooting me a sneer. I blush and cup my hand over my forehead as the paper slips onto my desk.

C-minus.

A C-minus? I don’t get C-minuses. I don’t even get B-minuses. A C-minus! My mind works over the grade, gnawing at it, trying to digest it, understand it, figure out how I’ll align it with the real Rennie Taylor, the one who gets straight A’s, the one who’s been accepted at Stanford, the one who’s . . .

The one who’s a virgin?

Tears sting my eyes, but I won’t let them fall on the notebook paper and blur my ink words. I just turn the test over and stare at all the cross outs and question marks. At the bottom of the back Mr. Schafer, Rob, whoever the hell he is, has written in clear, even script:
See me after class about this, Rennie. R.

“R.” Rob.

The bell rings, and all around me people stuff their tests into their binders. I turn the paper back and forth on my desk, the top with the C-minus, the back with the R, letting the students around me stand up, start their chatting. Pammie hangs around for a while, flirting with Rob, leaning over, pressing her palm to his desk as he sits down. Won’t she leave, won’t she leave? He says something and she laughs, and he puts his hand on hers and leaves it there just a little too long, and here I sit in the back of the classroom, folding and unfolding the edge of the test. Finally she pushes open the classroom door and we’re alone.

“Rennie, thanks for staying.” He punches the lock button.

I push the test away and uncross my legs. “The test. I know I messed it up.”

His dark hair shimmers like an insect’s wings, iridescent in the light, perfect. “Come here, Rennie. I want to show you something.” He pats the chair next to his desk.